Five Ways To Succeed With Google Shopping
While Google Shopping has been around since 2002, it has grown considerably in strength and sophistication in recent years, particularly since the October 2016 introduction of product listing ads — or PLAs — in its ubiquitous above the fold carousel. According to search intelligence firm Adthena’s “The Rise Of Google Shopping” report, the platform accounted for 76.4% of retail search ad spend in Q1 of 2018. Here at Clickshark, a Google Premier Partner Agency, our combined client Shopping revenue increased +184% over the two years since the carousel’s introduction. Year to date we’re up +60% and expect to build on that with a strong Q4 performance across all participating clients.
Google Shopping’s strong performance is particularly notable given Amazon’s growing dominance across the retail landscape. While nearly half of all product searches now begin on Amazon, Google still reigns supreme in search. Even conversions that occur in Amazon or in physical store locations often begin on Google Shopping, making it a critical part of any serious brand’s marketing strategy. This is particularly acute as consumers increasingly incorporate mobile devices into their shopping journey. According to Adthena’s report, Google Shopping ads on mobile devices accounted for 79% of device ad spend in the US in Q1 of 2018.
Nevertheless, for many brands digital marketing is not a core competency, and building and managing advertising campaigns can be intimidating and quickly bust budgets without providing actionable intelligence. At Clickshark, we apply industry best and proprietary practices along with our unique personalized approach to client relationships to consistently hit targets. Below, I outline what we consider the five fundamentals for success with Google Shopping.
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Treat Product Information As Strategy Not Obligation
Diligently cataloging your product details in your eCommerce platform can feel like busy work, but incomplete data cripples your ranking, makes bids more expensive and can result in your PLA not showing at all. Unlike Google Search, Google Shopping populates search results in the carousel by indexing its platform for products according to their Google product categorization, product information, description and keywords (among other criteria). All of this data is extracted from a feed you export from your eCommerce platform into Google Merchant Center.
Paramount amongst this data is the GTIN (also known as UPC or EAN) that Google requires to display PLAs for products available from other resellers. Failure to supply this will typically result in an error in Google Merchant Center and the ad will be prevented from serving. The next criteria — in roughly descending order of importance — are product title, description and keywords. Judicious use of the available screen real estate for titles and descriptions combined with a strong tail of relevant keywords helps to improve your search relevancy and click-through and conversion rates, improving your Google quality score.
At Clickshark, we partner with feed management platform Feedonomics to manage our client feed exports to Google Shopping. Feedonomic’s proprietary algorithms help transform large batches of product information according to our formulas, freeing our clients’ resources and allowing for continual A/B testing and optimization. They also help us simplify the implementation of our custom product type hierarchies, making ad campaign structuring logical and easy to use.
Separate Brand and Non-Brand Campaigns
Careful initial construction of your Shopping campaigns combined with continual manicuring helps to easily contextualize performance to improve decision-making and bid management. A common industry practice that we implement is the delineation of brand and non-brand campaigns.
Separating out brand queries acknowledges the customer’s advanced position in the conversion funnel. Having signaled a critical preference, we know they are more likely to convert and the higher average Cost Per Click (CPC) generally reflects this. By focusing only on keyword searches that include the client’s brand name, we can more aggressively court these customers without our ad spend also scooping in less relevant customers higher in the funnel.
Over time, the performance of brand campaigns provides a helpful barometer for brand awareness. A well-managed strategy increases impressions and revenue without driving up Cost Per Order (CPO) or sacrificing Return on Ad Spend (RoAS). Over the last year, we’ve been able to grow impressions by +70% and revenue by +43% while simultaneously driving CPO down -27% with a modest increase in RoAS.
Separate Campaigns By Device Type
It goes without saying that we behave differently online based on which device we’re using. Desktop still leads the charge in Digital Advertising as far as RoAS, but Mobile activity still constitutes the majority of traffic and, according to Adthena’s report, 79% of device ad spend from Google Shopping alone. Tablets run a distant third.
In 2016, Google separated out mobile, desktop and tablets for device-specific bid adjustments. Much like delineating brand from non-brand queries, managing your PLA bids according to device type empowers you to participate more efficiently in each part of the conversion funnel.
Just because your business may convert best on desktop doesn’t mean that your customer’s journey doesn’t begin on a mobile device or tablet. Fortunately, Google gives you the ability to track these “cross-device conversions” right in the Google Ads UI. Using device-specific bidding will further optimize your campaign performance and provide broader insights about your customers’ habits and behavior that will enable a more strategic approach to new customer acquisition.
Structure Your Campaigns To Reflect Your Business Goals
Subdivide your product mix by your own product type designations — typically how your assortment is categorized on your website. This is not the same as categorizing your products according to Google Product Categories — which may differ from how your business categorizes them. The latter determines how and when Google will serve ads for your product. The former determines how your assortment will be categorized in the AdWords UI where you review performance and make bid changes.
Custom product typing architecture gives you the most logical visibility to your performance and gives you levers to efficiently implement marketing strategy across your business. For example, a department store may choose to subdivide each category by different criteria. In Beauty, it may make sense to organize skincare products by brand, cosmetics by product type, and fragrances by a custom criterium like price tier to reflect your business’s unique selling proposition or strategic initiative.
The more complex your business, the more important it is to get this architecture right up front. Exercising flexibility in your approach to account structure is important, but significant changes in existing campaigns make month over month or year over year comparisons misleading without detailed internal documentation, poring over change history or continually creating new campaigns.
Add Negative Keywords
Unlike Search, in Shopping you are bidding to serve your PLA in the carousel rather than your ad in the search results. That difference is significant because it means rather than bidding on a specific phrase or keyword, you’re bidding on the relevancy of your product according to the numerous criteria Google collects from your product feed (among others). The net result of this difference is that Shopping campaigns take longer to mature and require an iterative approach to sculpting the conversion funnel.
By “sculpting” I mean a regular auditing of your Shopping campaigns’ search term report to add negative keywords — terms for which you don’t want your ad to serve. Newcomers to PPC too often discover that irrelevant or very top-of-funnel keywords will deplete their monthly ad budget in mere hours or days. Broad searches like “turtlenecks” often account for huge impression volume and clicks — and hence ad spend — but may rarely result in a conversion for your lavender, short sleeve, size 4, wool turtleneck.
That’s not to say your brand should add “turtleneck” as a negative keyword and never look at it again. In fact, many brands now recognize the importance of competing at the very top of the funnel in order to acquire new customers. Nevertheless, upper funnel strategy can be expensive and vacuum up ad spend that could have more efficiently converted customers already further down the funnel. This is why we at Clickshark focus on a more sustainable approach: stabilizing new client performance in Shopping first, and using a data-driven approach to incrementally open the funnel to these broader keywords over time to support the growth of the business.
Conclusion
These core practices will help you to build a strong foundation upon which to grow your business with Google Shopping, but they are by no means an exhaustive list. At Clickshark, we dive deep into more advanced features like location-based bidding, audience targeting and keyword, description and image optimization to supercharge Shopping performance for our clients. Combining this with analytics from Google Analytics and competing platforms empowers us to take a holistic approach to growing your business. Nevertheless, our journey in Google Shopping always begins with the fundamentals outlined in this article.
This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.
Clickshark is a nimble and innovative independent agency and Google Premier Partner specializing in serving small to mid-sized businesses. Operating in verticals from apparel to health care, Clickshark combines enterprise-level subject matter expertise with unique client-tailored solutions to maximize revenue and sustain growth. Our diverse team brings a wealth of cross-disciplinary experience to empower our clients with a holistic view of the emerging landscape in paid acquisition.
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